Without another word, the two newbies turned and trudged out of the room. Their body posture spoke of defeat, dejection and a mortal fear that an RTU order was in their future at some point.
Colby watched the two men shuffle listlessly out. The frown was still etched on his face, but now he focused it up at the corner where the speaker and camera were hidden. He jerked a thumb towards the door. “You get all that?”
There was a click and a woman’s voice — soft, authoritative and well spoken — responded. “They’re on their first run-through, Col. It’s a beasting nobody expects the first time around. Give them a second go at it and we’ll be able to make a decision from there. They’ll either get their shit together, or they won’t.”
Colby sniffed, rubbed his nose and nodded. “Yeah. Guess we all pissed our pants the first time, huh?”
“Speak for yourself, Mister Flynn!”
“Uh-oh!” Colby laughed out loud. He was in for a smack around the ear later from Yolanda for that one. He could tell — the only time she called him ‘Mister Flynn’ was when she was going all Sandhurst on his arse. “Okay. Get Micky to do a reset. We’ll go again at oh-two hundred. Zero warning. I want this to be as realistic as possible.”
“Copy that. I’ll get him to speed Binky number two up a bit as well.”
Colby rolled his eyes and sighed. “Seriously, Yol, Binky? Fucking Binky?”
“Honestly? I have no bloody idea. I think Micky’s a Discworld fan or something.”
The tannoy crackled then went silent. Colby flipped his NVGs down and scanned the room. It was too empty to make things realistic. If these guys were to become competent Taint hunters, then they needed to be pushed. Hard. He made a mental note to get some furniture put into this room. It could be an obstacle or a weapon, depending on how the guys reacted.
In the distance, four pops sounded in rapid succession. Colby frowned. There shouldn’t be anyone else in the kill house when they were training, so who was shooting? He thought for a moment and then shrugged. “Meh, probably one of the lads on the range.” Sound tended to travel in funny ways sometimes, thanks to the topography of the surrounding hills. He forgot about the gunfire and glanced at his watch. “Ooo! Chow time! Thank Christ for that, I’m starving!” His stomach let out a strangled gurgle and he pressed a hand on his abdomen to still the beast. “Yep. Deffo chow time.”
As he trotted out of the room and made his way down the corridors and stairs towards the ground floor, Colby mentally assessed the two lads. Terry Warner lacked confidence, but had shown real potential up until the most recent debacle. Leaving the safety on was unforgivable in a sweep-through of a known or even a potential hot zone. And he had frozen when he encountered Binky’s stink-eye act. Robbie Moore’s aim was atrocious. The lad needed at least a fortnight on the range and another week or two in the live-ammo kill house to get up to standard. But he had reacted according to his training, and saved his partner. So okay, both had messed up, but out of the two, Moore was probably worth a second chance…
“Whoa!” Colby threw an arm out to balance himself as his foot slid away. There was something greasy and viscous on the floor, as slippery as engine oil. The air had a strange metallic tang, mixed in with pungent top notes of shit and opened bowels. The hairs on the back of Colby’s neck rose, and he glanced at the floor. A smear, like a sauce flourish on a top-end restaurant plate, formed a crescent where his boot heel had skidded. The liquid was thick, dark, and in the iridescent light of a full moon Flynn could see vapour rising off it. So it was warm, then. And fresh. Very, very fresh.
He crouched, flipped his NVGs up and out of the way, and dipped a finger in the liquid. He rubbed it between his finger and thumb. As he pulled his thumb and finger apart, the liquid formed a hair-fine connection before snapping and creating two globules, one on each finger. Colby scowled. “Damn…” He knew that consistency. Only one fluid in the world felt like that — blood.
He pressed the button on his radio with his left hand. His right instinctively curled around the butt of a Glock 17 that sat in a holster strapped to his thigh. He flicked the safety off and disengaged the coiled lanyard that the Health and Safety lot insisted on attaching to the gun for no apparent reason other than that they knew it annoyed the ever living shit out of him. He cradled the butt in his hand, ready for a quick draw if necessary. “Micky, I’m in corridor two. Confirmation please, mate.”
A voice crackled in his earpiece. “Go ahead, Col.”
“I’ve got blood here. A lot of blood. Is this part of the simulation?”
“Blood?”
“Yeah. Blood. Ya know, blood. That sticky red shit that’s quite important for the whole living thing. I know you have a passion for realism in these simulations, you mad bastard, but does it stretch to chucking a gallon of pig’s blood on the floor as well?”
“Negative, mate. Negative.”
“Then we have a problem. Scan for heat signatures. I think we might have a live one on our hands here, fella.”
“Copy that. The captain’s getting Alpha and Bravo teams ready.”
Colby pressed the squawk button again. “That’s reassuring. Arm up for warm bodies. I’ve got a really bad feeling about this…”
Colby stood, the Glock now cradled in his hand. His Blackhawk combat knife pressed against his left hip. He had seventeen hollowpoint rounds and six inches of precision ground D-2 steel with a wickedly sharp edge. He patted the knife for reassurance. You might run out of bullets, but you never run out of knife.
He flipped his goggles back down. The NVGs allowed him to see clearly in that weird, mottled-green monotone, but like any soldier he knew full well that they could distort things, especially depth perception. Objects seen through a pair of NVGs could be closer than they appeared, a bit like a police car in a wing mirror. And when you were talking about getting the jump on Taints, that was not a good thing. You wanted Taints to be as far away from you as possible. And preferably dead.
Instinct kicked in. Since his first encounter with the granddaddy of the undead back in Turkey a year earlier, Colby Flynn had gone toe-to-toe with vampires of both kinds on numerous occasions. As part of the elite Alpha Unit, it was his job to keep London free of the man-made monstrosities that constituted probably the worst ever national ‘science project gone bad’ that the public didn’t know about.
Taints.
He thought about the first time he’d been briefed by Yolanda about the damn things. It had been quite possibly the single most bizarre PowerPoint presentation he’d ever sat through. And if it hadn’t have been for his experience with Micky Cox and Gary Parks back in that Turkish castle, he wouldn’t have believed a single word about vampires or any of that supernatural shit. But Flynn knew now there was a big dollop of fact behind the myth of Vampirism. It was real. It existed, and it sure as hell didn’t ‘sparkle’ like those Hollywood idiots portrayed it in the movies. It bit. It tore flesh. It devoured. And it was loose on the nighttime streets of London.
Yolanda had explained to the team that the Old World vampires were bad enough. But these mutant vampires — these ‘Taints’ — were a whole different level of crazy. They’d been created in a lab, not in some draughty castle full of bats and bad memories. Taints had emerged from a single lineage — a ‘Lucy’ whose DNA had been tainted by a rogue gene — hence the name. A hiccup in a single piece of coding had produced a vampire with all the fury, the strength, speed and blood-lust of the Old World version. Only much, much worse.